Saturday, October 20, 2012

Island Forge - That Next Step

If you've read any of the previous Island Forge tutorials (like this one or this one), you've probably checked out the results on the Isle of Test. If you've been there, you've probably seen this in the wilderness...

Now What?

As you can see, there's a part of the island you can't reach, because we all know rocks and ocean are impassable terrain, right?

Oh Hai!

Guess not. The trick for today is the invisible actor. Here's what this area looks like in Island Builder.

Who is that?

This actor is very simple. It has a single dialog node that says the player found a way to scramble out onto the rocks. A secret side effect of placing an actor though, is that impassible areas become passable. To actually cross this point, you click on the stones, which moves your character to that spot and triggers the actor. Once on the spot, you can move off to either side.

Piece of cake. Of course you could give this spot more complex logic, and using this construct would be a great way to flag an area as visited. You could have a quest giver order the player to visit a shrine, which is only reachable by crossing an area like this, then use the invisible actor to flag the site as visited. Hmm. That's a good idea actually... off to tinker!

I hope this and the other posts like it have been useful, thanks for reading!